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Old 07-22-2013, 03:49 PM
 
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just found out about a country in Africa called Equatorial Guinea and it's official language is Spanish, does this make them Hispanic?
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Old 07-22-2013, 03:54 PM
 
Location: Cumberland County, NJ
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I guess they would be considered Afro-Latino. The more interesting question is "Would immigrants from that country be able to identify themselves as Hispanics in the United States?"
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Old 07-22-2013, 03:58 PM
 
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Speaking, or not speaking, Spanish does not make someone Hispanic or not.
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Old 07-22-2013, 04:32 PM
 
Location: San Diego, California Republic
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Quote:
Originally Posted by boxus View Post
Speaking, or not speaking, Spanish does not make someone Hispanic or not.
Then what does? Hispanic in the US can be of any race as it's an ethnicity based on a Spanish heritage so to speak. Dominicans are considered Hispanic in the US as well as Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and sometimes even Filipinos although they generally don't speak Spanish anymore but most have Spanish names.
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Old 07-22-2013, 04:35 PM
 
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Can someone be Hispanic and have a race? most dominicans are mixed, only a small percentage of them are 100% black and 100% white. the ones that are 100% black or white consider themselves hispanic due to the fact that they were born in their spanish speaking country while still having a race
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Old 07-22-2013, 05:16 PM
 
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Originally Posted by Brokconl View Post
just found out about a country in Africa called Equatorial Guinea and it's official language is Spanish, does this make them Hispanic?
It's not often that I respond to imbecility. But this post really did it!

Is an Equatorial Guinean Hispanic?

You're kidding, right???

How many years did it take you to get thru first grade???

Oh my f-ing God!!!
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Old 07-22-2013, 05:19 PM
 
Location: San Diego, California Republic
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Dude
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Old 07-22-2013, 06:38 PM
 
Location: Victoria TX
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Hispanic is a self-declared category created by the US Census Bureau. Any person can claim to be Hispanic, which is defined as having a cultural or ethnic relationship to the people of Spain. If a person from Equatorial Guinea made this claim in the USA, it would likely not be challenged.

"In the eyes of the US Census Bureau, Hispanics or Latinos can be of any race, any ancestry, any ethnicity, or any country of origin," -- Wikipedia

He is a black person of African ancestry who grew up in a Spanish speaking country. How does that make him different from a black Panamanian, whose only claim to distinction is that his ancestors from Guinea spent a couple of generations in the Caribbean and Central America?
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Old 07-22-2013, 06:49 PM
 
Location: Cumberland County, NJ
8,632 posts, read 12,999,317 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chacho_keva View Post
It's not often that I respond to imbecility. But this post really did it!

Is an Equatorial Guinean Hispanic?

You're kidding, right???

How many years did it take you to get thru first grade???

Oh my f-ing God!!!
So the rules of what qualifies someone as a Hispanic doesn't count if that person comes from a country that just so happens to be in Africa?
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Old 07-22-2013, 07:16 PM
 
Location: Somewhere on the Moon.
10,086 posts, read 14,959,511 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Gentoo View Post
Then what does? Hispanic in the US can be of any race as it's an ethnicity based on a Spanish heritage so to speak. Dominicans are considered Hispanic in the US as well as Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and sometimes even Filipinos although they generally don't speak Spanish anymore but most have Spanish names.
Most people in Latin America have some Spanish blood mixed in, so even though most are non-whites, they are genetically tied to Spain and that also legitimizes their cultural, linguistic, culinary, architectural, etc connection to Spain, Hispanic culture, and other Hispanic countries. This is also why a random person from Spain, Venezuela, Cuba, Chile, Panama, Mexico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Argentina, etc may actually be distant cousins along their European genetic side regardless if they are white, mestizos, mulattoes or whatever other racial mix that includes Spanish/European in the mix.

Having said all of that, the single category taken into consideration if a person is Hispanic or not is actually not based on whether a person has Spanish blood in them, but rather if a person speaks Spanish as their mother tongue. The reason of this is that language affects very deeply the way people see and interpret the world and the mother tongue of a person often does makes the biggest difference between them and others that don't speak the same mother tongue, and this difference is present even with people that speak said mother tongue as a second language.

I'm not sure if most Equatorial Guineans speak Spanish as a mother tongue. Unlike in the Western Hemisphere, in Africa its much more common for natives to speak an African language as a mother tongue and a European language as a second language (what European language predominates as a second language depends on the colonial history of the country: ex-British colonies have English as a second language, ex-French have French, ex-Italian have Italian, etc.)

Take Dominicans as an example. Regardless of the fact that over 90% of Dominicans have Spanish blood and have a genetic/historic/cultural connection to Spain (most of the population is of mostly black/white racially mixed and the white part is mostly of Spanish origin, and most of the white minority descend from Spaniards too); practically 100% of ethnic Dominicans speak Spanish as their mother tongue and over 95% of them not only speak Spanish as a mother tongue, but its also the only language that they speak.

This may not be the case in Equatorial Guinea. For one, most of the population is probably of pure Sub-Saharan African origin and most of the population probably lives in the countryside. That combination is almost a guarantee that most don't speak Spanish as their mother tongue, because in Africa the European influence is almost exclusively concentrated along the major coastal towns and major cities. As soon as people leave the cities, the European influences diminishes very quickly and this is very noticeable.

I'll have to do more research into Equatorial Guinea to be sure of their dynamics, but I'm confident what I said here is probably close to reality.

Equatorial Guinea may be a very true case of colonialism (non-European people having a European culture -which is alien to them- imposed on them) whereas in Latin America I'm not so sure colonialism exist in its true form, because most Latin Americans do have at least some Spanish ancestry, so Spanish culture is not really any more alien to them as are the indigenous or African cultures as well.
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